Generic Class

Generics allows you to define type-safe datatypes without declaring any datatypes and also you can write methods and class that works in any datatypes. Lets have a look on generics with the below sample code.

Example

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;

namespace GenericsApplication
{
    public class MyGenericClass<T>
    {
        private T[] array;
        public MyGenericClass(int size)
        {
            array = new T[size + 1];
        }
        public T getItem(int index)
        {
            return array[index];
        }
        public void setItem(int index, T value)
        {
            array[index] = value;
        }
    }
           
    class Sample
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            //declaring an int array
            MyGenericClass<int> intArray = new MyGenericClass<int>(5);
            //setting values
            for (int c = 0; c < 5; c++)
            {
                intArray.setItem(c, c*5);
            }
            //retrieving the values
            for (int c = 0; c < 5; c++)
            {
                Console.Write(intArray.getItem(c) + " ");
            }
            Console.WriteLine();
            //declaring a character array
            MyGenericClass<char> charArray = new MyGenericClass<char>(5);
            //setting values
            for (int c = 0; c < 5; c++)
            {
                charArray.setItem(c, (char)(c+97));
            }
            //retrieving the values
            for (int c = 0; c< 5; c++)
            {
                Console.Write(charArray.getItem(c) + " ");
            }
            Console.WriteLine();
            Console.ReadKey();
        }
    }
}

In the above example code you can notice that we have declared a class named MyGenericClass as generic type and in Sample class we are explicitly set the datatype for that class while creating object for it. 

Output
0 5 10 15 20
a b c d e